


Therefore

by montparnasse



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-15
Updated: 2015-01-15
Packaged: 2018-03-07 18:09:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3178125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The shortest distance between two people is rarely a straight line. It's a good thing Josephine knows how to dance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Therefore

Their first kiss is a rough crash of bone and brick in the teeth of a burnt-orange harvest moon, the two of them pressed up hard against one of the northern ramparts on another sleepless midnight, all keyed-up with a new grief heavy around their throats. Cassandra’s hands clutch tight in the silk slung around her waist, tugging her closer and closer until Josephine can feel her heart singing in her own skin, beating, beating, beating like a war drum.

But then she makes to keep her, tries to hold Cassandra there against her with an arm sliding around her waist, and it’s over, nothing but a wrinkled sash and the secret inner curl of her spine shoved against the stone where Cassandra had pulled her close only a breath before. Cold air slams into her lungs; she reaches back to put a palm on the ancient rock and settles into the darkness there, uncertain always of what to do with empty hands.

“My—apologies,” says Cassandra, unsteady in those thick, velvet-rich tones of hers. She swallows and does not look at Josephine, but at least she stands her ground, doesn’t back away. “This will not happen again. Lady Montilyet.”

And she’s down the stairs before Josephine’s mouth ever has a chance to catch up with her brain, gone with the night winds that bore her like she was never there at all. The stars overhead bloom out softly in tiny dandelion-bursts of light; Josephine wipes her lips with the back of her hand and tries not to feel so much like she’s just been shipwrecked, bereft and breathless on the shore.

Once she’s back inside, she fills her hands with her quill and ink, and works the rest of the night through nothing of consequence; she doesn’t, _doesn’t_ think about it. Later, much later, she will realize that she never smoothed out the creases in her sash, deep as fault lines and incriminating at her hips, where they linger like a stain all through negotiations the next day.

—

In theory, Josephine knows, Cassandra doesn’t fancy women. She takes the flirting and the hints both subtle and unsubtle with the same fumbling grace she does any other compliment from any other person in the wide and rocky reach of Thedas; takes it so well, in fact, that she lets her fingers linger at Josephine’s waist during a debriefing, finds her fidgeting with the hem of a scarf or tapping her quill against the parchment at her desk and smiles like a thief caught out, and Josephine never knows whether to take it for benediction, or fondness, or perhaps something else entirely, something nameless and not quite in bloom.

In practice, when Josephine takes to watching her in the courtyard, glorious as a myth with a sword and a shield, Cassandra takes to watching her as well from the southeast window, maneuvers the straw target out of the way and shows Josephine her sword arm.

In practice, when Cassandra has difficulty—either real or manufactured—with her belt buckle, she watches Josephine’s fingers pull it through the clasp for her, says nothing of the hitch of her breath, says nothing of Josephine’s knees brushing hers when she stands too close and leans in.

In practice, Josephine pretends to innocence every time Cassandra touches her earrings, her bracelet, each individual bead of her necklace with her knuckles grazing across her collarbone down to the gentle swell of her breast, asking her where they’re from, where she’s been.

In practice, on the knife’s edge of the night before the Inquisitor leaves for the Western Approach, Josephine leaves her door open and keeps the fire going long after her sense and good breeding would normally dictate, and it is Cassandra who steps inside and closes it just before midnight. It is Cassandra who unfastens the silk at Josephine’s neck, wildly, wonderingly. And it is Cassandra who blows out the candle on the desk, Cassandra who pulls her close by the belt at her waist, Cassandra, solid and certain as the white flood of moonrise, who kisses Josephine first in the dark by her bed, both of them restless and wanting.

“Are you going to apologize again, Lady Seeker?” she asks, pulling Cassandra down with her on the bed and pushing herself up on her elbows so their noses slot together sharply. “I should think I’m owed a larger one after this. A few trinkets from Val Royeaux, perhaps.”

“And I’m not reward enough?”

“You are the only reward, dear Lady,” she whispers, her teeth trailing slowly, slowly along the harsh cut of Cassandra’s jaw, smiling there when she feels the shiver shake through her, starting up in her shoulders and trembling all the way down to her toes. “I was starting to think all that swordplay was actually for _practice_! There’s no need to be shy, you know.”

“I am not shy.” Cassandra, her cheeks poppy-pink, a mouth set tense and brittle enough to snap.

“Of course you’re not,” whispers Josephine, knuckles counting the bump of her ribs to her narrow hips, “this is so very—haha—so very _bold_ of you, Seeker. I could almost forget how you stutter over your wine.”

“For all you know, that might well have been for show.” Her palm drags up Josephine’s belly to her breast, makes something sharp and sweet coil up and dissolve between her legs. “I might have been trying to make you laugh.”

“You’re lovely, you know,” murmurs Josephine. “Completely.”

“Hush,” Cassandra mutters softly, and then Josephine has a thigh pressing hard between her legs in a soft shift of limbs and hips, her dress hitched up around her loose belt and holding on mostly by a few strong threads and a stubborn miracle; Cassandra rocks into her with a tense hiss of breath, watching as Josephine gently unclasps her trousers to push them down her hips, watching still as she slides a hand into the slick softness there, feeling herself groan when Cassandra grabs her wrist and moves irregularly, one palm braced beside Josephine’s head.

It’s a head-rush, this closeness, the strange new thrill of the two of them, together. Her body moves out of tune with Cassandra’s, palms pressed to tight angles of bone and muscle and tendons pulled taut like brick and mortar; she squeezes her hands around Cassandra’s biceps, feels her shift and flex beneath her fingers as she tugs her down by the shoulders and presses their bodies together.

This is the sort of thing she hasn’t had since—well, since Antiva, since years ago, since before the specters of duty and adulthood took up permanent residence in her head and amplified the voice of reason by several octaves. Josephine loses her fingers in Cassandra’s hair and kisses her hard, and _harder_ , tongue flicking a shock between her lips until she shudders with it, and then Josephine’s gasping against her throat as Cassandra brushes her middle finger over her clit, watching her face shift with something like surprise, something like reverence.

Lying on the messy bed after, she sits up to pull her hair down from its low chignon when Cassandra stops her; “Let me,” she says, so softly that Josephine thinks she would deny her nothing. She shivers at the fingers lingering in the notches of her spine, at the way she feels so new and raw and open in the flush of the blood-dark autumn night, her heart suddenly heavy on her tongue.

“We will not speak of this tonight,” says Cassandra, slipping beneath the sheets on her own side of the rickety bed and pulling the quilt up around her shoulders.

Josephine looks over at her from the pillow, hair in her eyes, her profile set in sharp relief against the shadows, sharp as a nightbird with a sweetness to her smile she wears only for her, and says, “Maybe.”

Her bed is small even by Skyhold standards, not quite big enough for two with scarcely enough blanket besides, and Cassandra keeps herself and her unquiet dreams to her own side, in theory, but her long limbs do wander in the night and tangle there with Josephine’s, dark and private, just before dawn.

—

Time has a way of passing so much slower when worry settles into your gut and wrings you out, never quite matching the frantic swell of your heart against your ribs on the coldest nights when the last of the ashes die slowly in the grate and you’re left with only your own blood heating your temples and a clock that beats like mockery. Nothing keeps time like your own body, Josephine knows, and so she takes to the stairs and the northern ramparts to stamp it out beneath her heels, counts the hours to the rhythm of her quill murmuring against the parchment until her shadow grows long and lonesome across the far wall and, at last, she sleeps.

It isn’t until Cassandra is opening her door again—oh, _finally_ —on a pale grey evening that’s put frost on her windowpane, looking worn and diminished with the stretch of the ceaseless western sun, that the world wrenches forward on its axis and catches up to feet that have long outrun the second hand: I’m-here, I’m-here, I’m-here, ticking down the space between them until Cassandra is collapsing into her, tired with joy, and Josephine holds onto her with strength enough for both of them. Holds on, because _this_ , she knows as her own.

—

Sometimes, Cassandra says nothing at all. Josephine is surprised to find she often doesn’t have to.

She accompanies her to Val Royeaux, sits beside Josephine in court and sips wine the color of summertime dusk with only marginal distaste, and then Josephine follows her to the Hinterlands, stays in Redcliffe to secure an alliance and waits for Cassandra to come back with a bloodied sword and a cool wild brightness clinging to her skin, this beautiful, recalcitrant knight who listens for Josephine’s footsteps like heartbeats in the dark. It’s the inflection of shared breath, the dialect of watching and waiting and wanting, this unspoken language only they know.

Of course, people start to talk, because that’s what people do. It spreads from the practice yard at Skyhold and into the tavern, and from there it sails fast for Val Royeaux and the Empress’ court on the western winds, spreads to Denerim and Starkhaven and Ostwick and who knows where else, and every time she sees Cassandra’s shoulders stiffen or her mouth twist with the glass shards of a curse at the whispers and the stares, Josephine wants to press a hand to her waist like ballast, wishes herself a huntress so she could lay an offering in flesh and blood at her feet. It is nothing less than Cassandra deserves, nothing less than she would give again and again, if only she knew how.

Early one evening, shortly after they’ve dropped the last shreds of any tight-lipped pretense, Josephine steers her around her room to the tune of the tavern music seeping through the half-open window, at least a head shorter than Cassandra and leading like she was made for it. She catches sight of Cassandra’s smile, thrills at having put it there when she suddenly finds herself pulled closer, their feet gliding into something honey-slow, and Josephine knows she’s been _had_.

“You _lied_ ,” she laughs, a little breathless. “You said you didn’t know how. Who’s been teaching you Antivan waltzes, hmm? Should I be defending my honor?”

“Maybe I already knew how.”

“Maybe you talked some pretty serving girl into showing you.”

“You are _exasperating_ ,” Cassandra sighs. Her mouth twitches.

“You like me that way.”

Cassandra, the sly conqueror’s smile on her mouth, spins her around and draws her flush with her chest before turning her around by the waist again, and again. Josephine loves her like this, loose and rosy-cheeked with romance; it’s so easy to be swept up in such a vast presence, the graceful physicality of her, that she can almost, almost forget the shadows stacking up darker and darker in every corner of their map. 

It would be so lovely, she thinks, to have this forever: Her hand in Cassandra’s, someone to wait for and someone who will wait for her, a home here at the end of the world. She presses her lips to Cassandra’s neck, right where her pulse runs hot. “Yvette has it in her head that we’re going to elope,” she confides.

“And where might she have gotten that idea?”

One turn, and then another; if she plays all her cards just right, she could squeeze half a waltz out of Cassandra at the Winter Palace next month—and she always plays her cards right. “Varric has been… sending her things. First editions, he says, worth more than the family coffers.”

“Yvette is taking an interest in editing, now?” says Cassandra, and then, softer, “He might have mentioned it to _me_ , too.”

“She fancies herself an artist, actually. I think—I think he’s hoping she will, ah, illustrate them.”

“Oh. Well then.” She swallows, turns a very attractive shade of strawberry. “I see.”

“I’ve tried to dissuade her, but you know—I’ve told you, I mean, how, how _idealistic_ she is. Always with her head so far above the clouds she can see the moon.”

“Hmm.” Cassandra slows to a stop but doesn’t let go of her hands, taking them both and tugging, gently, until Josephine is sitting beside her on the sofa and the firelight gets in their eyes, turning everything rich with warmth. “I think I like it. The romance of it.”

“Of the two of us?” she asks, looking at Cassandra, beautiful as always, that bright unbroken face.

“Yes,” she says. “We’re grand and revolutionary, don’t you think? Worth at least a few chapters.”

“An entire book.”

“A five-part series,” Cassandra laughs, curling a loose piece of hair around her finger. From where her head rests against her shoulder, Josephine can hear her heart beating like a song of valor in her ears, wondering what it must be like to be cut from something so certain, as solid and glorious as the red earth itself; it still surprises her that Cassandra sees between the cracks in every veneer she paints on and comes to her anyway, just for Josephine and nothing more, so strange, sometimes, to be wanted for herself and only herself rather than the promises of all the different women she’s been, all the other faces she’s worn. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Cassandra’s smile; she matches it with her own, soft and sweet as sunrise.

It occurs to her later that night that there are words for this; it occurs to her, with Cassandra’s lungs swelling and deflating beneath her fingers, that she really should have seen it coming.

—

Most nights now, long before dark and long since heedless of who might see, Cassandra finds her in the study and sits with her, sharpens her sword, reads through her strange tomes until her candle melts down to a stub, lets Josephine scrub the ink from her cheek when she chews a quill, pours tea for both of them and remembers to put the cream in first for Josephine and her bone-china-tea-set heart. They share meals. They share beds, stories, space, sleepless walks up the ramparts at dawn, comfort on the deadest nights when there’s nothing else but the solidity of their own skin. She can hardly remember how she slept without Cassandra there to set herself against.

She supposes she’s in love then, not the way the bards sing of it, but the way the birds and the trees do. The sort that knows when to fly south, when to grow and make room and breathe. The sort the poets talk about, ageless, unafraid.

—

In the spring, with the trees still bare and a lacework of late frost clinging to Val Royeaux’s cobblestone and glass, the whole city ripe with potential, lovely and ugly and terrifying by turns; she’s just coming from tea with her mother and Yvette, here on family business regarding the Otrantos but mostly for an informal dinner with Cassandra, when she pushes her way through a crowd as dense as stormclouds to find the man himself: hard as sheer granite, proud as a lion, rapier in hand—and hammering with violence against Cassandra’s.

It takes a moment to register that she’s really seeing this and hasn’t fallen into one of Cassandra’s innuendo-smeared novels, but there it is: A duel for her hand, which Cassandra is fighting viciously. The whole thing would probably be much more thrilling if it were set in ink, without the slick metal smell of blood on the wind or the valiant stupidity of the entire thing. Josephine presses to the front with fear coiled tight in her belly and a fierceness that bursts out of her until she’s staring both of them down, no weapon like a good glare.

“Josephine, I am—”

She waves her hand in the air between them, shoves the words aside. “I cannot _believe_ you would do this! After I told you I would sort things out, and you’re—you’re out here needlessly risking your own life—”

“Josephine—”

“—Risking _everything_ , and for what? Some, some foolish sense of duty?” She takes a breath around the heart beating heavy in her throat, not quite as gratified as she’d like to be when she sees Lord Otranto take a step back from the corner of her eye. “The Inquisition needs you, it’s _always_ needed you—why would you gamble that away?”

“And you don’t?” Cassandra’s jaw clenches once, twice; Josephine can hear the high strain in her voice. “Because—I certainly need _you_ , and this idiot thinks he’s going to decide things in your place. I would hear it from you, instead.”

She startles, more at the hurt hiding underneath the sad line of Cassandra’s mouth than the question; that she would actually say it, though, is enough to make something spark in Josephine’s chest, fluttering with her pulse. After all this time, she thought Cassandra must surely know; for the first time, Josephine wonders if she doesn’t.

“Of course I need you,” she says, loud enough that the crowd can hear. “That is precisely _why_ this is so, so ridiculous! I just—why? Why are you doing this?”

“Because I love you!”

And it’s all out before Josephine can even paint on her most indignant face again, punctuated with the shrill metal clang of her Antivan rapier being thrown to the ground, head held high in challenge and, Josephine thinks, the sort of devotion that sees you through to the end. There’s a heartbeat, and then another, and she’s asking, “You do?”

Cassandra says, “I do,” just for her.

For a moment, her whole body goes still as an effigy, but then, Cassandra is taking a step towards her, waiting, and Josephine knows exactly what she wants to say: _This is the part where you leap into my arms and we get to turn the page._

So, this is the part where Josephine leaps into Cassandra’s arms, and Cassandra spins her around until they’re both dizzy with it, and Josephine presses her lips to Cassandra’s ear and says, “I’ve loved you for an inordinately long time, Lady Seeker. Just so you know.”

“You might have _said_ ,” says Cassandra, bright and wild, and kisses her again, and again. Once, it’s something she might have done just to remind herself how much she didn’t care, how Josephine was worth all the stares and the occasional stab of scorn; now, it’s something she does because she wants to, because she _can_ , because she loves her better than she loves the ground at her feet or the blade at her hip. Because she loves her, she _loves_ her, and she always has.

“And you might have said, too. If you wanted an audience, we could have disrupted drinks at the tavern when we got back, or maybe announced it over war table discussions. It would have been so wildly inappropriate.”

“I—I prefer this, I think. It’s almost—”

“—Storybook,” Josephine finishes, threading her fingers though Cassandra’s belt loops and pulling her as close as she can, watching her pulse shiver in the thin skin of her throat. “ _Are_ we going to run away and elope? It would be such a scandal. I could take up dueling and fight anyone who objects.”

“Mmm. You could do worse, you know,” says Cassandra. The last light of the sun turns her eyes bright and grey as winter, crinkled with the smile she’s wearing just for Josephine, the one she’s come to think of as her favorite. “I like to think we’re a matched set.”

“I think we might just be,” says Josephine, and she stretches her arms around Cassandra’s shoulders , as if she could make this one moment stretch out and keep it there, frozen, forever. She kisses her and kisses her until the ships drop anchor at the docks and the sky stirs itself dark with stars, burning high with promise. Untiring.

—

Back home, up on the northern ramparts with the scythe moon hanging like a lantern just out of reach, Josephine takes Cassandra’s hand, and steps into the light.


End file.
